Author: zachzurn

Make Steel Looking text. Also learn how to make the brushed steel texture. Once you know this you can add your own modifications and create your own steel look. There are millions of ways of making the steel text look. This is one way.

Level: Intermediate

Photoshop Version: CS2 (Can be done in Earlier versions up to Photoshop 7.0)

Definitions:

DPI: Dots Per Inch. This means how many pixels there are per inch of space.

Tutorial:

First create a new image with a black background. Create it 5 Inches Wide by 1 1/2 Inches tall at 300 dpi, or a dpi you desire.

Next, with your choice of font, create a white text saying whatever you would like to put there. I used Steel as the text and Franklin Gothic as the font. Some other good fonts for this are Bank Gothic and Copperplate Gothic.

Press “Ctrl j” while selected on the text layer. This will make a copy of the layer.

Next click on the rasterized type layer and click the lock transparent pixels button. This will loc the transparent pixels, so that anything you do to this layer wont affect the already transparent pixels.

Next thing you do is go to [Filer -> Noise -> Add Noise]

Apply the settings as seen here. If you want more streaks up the amount. If you want mutli-color streaks unclick “Monochromatic” which means one color only.

Next, go to [Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur]

Apply the settings here, or change them as you desire. The main one you might want to adjust is distance. This is how much it applies the motion blur.

Now Select the gradient tool. Go to the gradient editor and select the “foreground to transparent” gradient. Click ok. Make sure your foreground is black. Then drag you gradient from bottom-right up to the top-left and top-left to the bottom-right. Here you can see what we are going for:

Next double click on the rasterized text layer to open the layer styles window. Check the box named satin and set the settings shown here or a variation if you like.

Make an image cooler, meaning make the overall cast of an image, a bluish color. This can be used to make images look more cutting edge, or even making them look more cold.

Level:Intermediate

Photoshop Version: CS2

Tutorial:

First you would open the image you would like to adjust. Here we open an image of a Lexus car.

Next, go to [Image -> Adjustments -> Photo Filter]. This will open the Photo Filter window.

Set the settings as shown here, you can test with different shades of blue or cyan. Here we used a cyanish blue. The density here is set pretty high. Density determines how much the color is applied. If you keep “preview” checked you will be able to see the outcome of the image. Notice the image has a cooler look.

The photo filter can be used in many ways and is a great image adjuster. I use it a lot to give photos the right feeling. You can use any color you want, it depends on what feel you want the photo to have. For example, if you are doing a design that is orangish and you put a photo into it, but the photo sticks out too much, you can apply an orangish photo filter to bring it into better color harmony.

The good thing about the photo filter is that it keeps the rest of the photo details in tact and keeps the rest of the colors there. Before they had this adjustment I would try to use Hue/Saturation, which would ruin the image details and it wouldn’t give a general cast, it would just apply a color over the whole image. The photo filter is good, because it only changes the colors for certain parts of the photo, but keeps the general color composition the same for the rest of the photo.